opera and concerts in london and beyond

12 February 2013

Keenlyside passes Russian test

Intermezzo's Russian spy reports back from last night's Eugene Onegin that every single performer managed well with the language, often a stumbling block for non-native speakers.

Elena Maximova (Olga), the only Russian in the Royal Opera House cast, received the only perfect score. All the others revealed accents of various origins, though, to the surprise of my spy, there were no mistakes whatsoever, and every word came across clearly. A frequent operagoer, she said she was "amazed" they'd done so well, particularly when she learned that Simon Keenlyside doesn't speak the language at all.

The well-deserved applause video above is from Saturday night's show - thanks to Kyoko.

The singing wasn't at all bad - though Stoyanova looked old enough to be her own mother - and Robin Ticciati acquitted himself well, apart from the absurdly fast tempo he adopted in the first women's chorus, which quite destroyed the melody. But the production! It was terrible, pointless (the silly use of dancers was simply a confusing distraction) and, at times, risible: just before the duel, the Captain says of Onegin to Lensky that it's 7 o'clock and no sign of him, when Onegin is standing right at his elbow! And why on earth did the faux-Tatiana climb up the wall and sit sulking during the final scene? What was that supposed to convey?

And one more thing: the failure of the surtitles for the whole of Part 1 was a piece of monumental incompetence.